From: [email protected]
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of John Clark
Sent: Saturday, December 27, 2014 10:46 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: William Stanley Jevons
On Fri, Dec 26, 2014 at 10:29 PM, Kim Jones <[email protected]> wrote:
> Tee hee. So you are saying - are you not - that it never makes sense to worry
> in any naked sense about our tendency to gobble everything up like bacteria
> in a petri dish
The bacteria shouldn't worry if the edge of the petri dish hasn't come into
view even in the largest telescopes the bacteria can build.
But we live on a biosphere on the watery and rocky floor of the ocean of air
enveloping our planets gravity well. Our planet has 510 million square
kilometers of surface (more than 70% of which is covered by ocean, leaving
under 150 million square kilometers of land surface area).
By far most of our planet is inaccessible to us, locked up in the mantle and
the core. Our entire recoverable planetary resource base is contained within
the very thin skin of the atmosphere, land surface; the upper crust we can mine
or drill down to and the oceans (to the extent we can). Our whole resource base
is this thin shell at the planetary surface.
This is not an inexhaustible resource base and to use the petri dish analogy it
most definitely is not beyond the view of our most powerful telescopes.
Off planet the universe is infinite; it is just that getting there to this
infinite resources out there is also infinitely hard. I am sure Alpha Centauri
systems have plenty of resources, but they do not count as part of us
earthlings reserves until such time as we can actually go there to recover them.
I personally wish that over the last five decades the super powers had spent
more effort in getting off planet than they did in struggling with each other
down here in the trenches on earth. I believe we would have been in a very
different situation if we had already established other resource bases on the
(small gravity wells of) the moon and near earth asteroids.
But instead we burned our planetary surplus up in a fantastically expensive
cold war. What did that get us? We are here where we now are, because of past
stupid (perhaps inevitable) decisions and a global misdirection of effort into
– non-producing military expenditures as opposed to building up an orbital
infrastructure built using significant inputs from off world resource bases
(such as the moon).
But we did not do that and by now I doubt if we can; we have become too
impoverished by now and locked into a planetary resource struggle end game.
-Chris
John K Clark
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